Where are all these "stupid people" that supposedly exist?

[Gali]

I think everyone is stupid now and then. The important thing is to stfu or admit it but, especially on the Internet, few of us do that. Also, people like to call someone stupid because they don't like his/her opinion or whatever.

So no, I don't think there is any truth behind the "f*cking people"-mentality. Then again, I might just be naive and/or also have an anti-stupid force field around me, too.

caption: ham and cheese
Damn it, I'm hungry now. -.-^^

 

[EtherealBeaver]

Some fameous guy once said "Think about how stupid the average consumer is - then realise half of them are even stupider than that".

Working as a teacher at a very large private school, most people I run into are not stupid or (that) annoying but when I go to my voulenteer work with troubled kids from low-resource families, the story gets very different indeed. Here I meet people I would say have "bodega wisdom" at best. Its basically that they take all the stories they hear at their local bar or bodega and assume it is all fact. Considering myself an academic, also working on the sideline as an author, I have to say that some timetimes I hear stuff which sounds so resonatingly stupid you would stop in your track and refuse to belive anyone actually said anything like that.

It really comes down to social context I think. What sounds super smart in one social arena would sound ear-shatteringly stupid in another. Not because the message changed but because the context changed and I think that is where all the complaints come from. People like me who travel between very discinct social contexts, people who work in customer service where a ton of different social perspectives meet, people who just add random people on facebook (which again causes crashes in social paradigms) and so forth.

There is a captioned image of a facebook conversation somewhere where one part says that "its going to be a looooooong semester because her new teacher is stupid and doesnt belive in creationism", the point here being that the reader should laugh at the supposed stupidity in said picture. What you belive about that is up to you, but this is a clear case of percived stupidity being the product of social constructs of what is and is not legitimate intellectual behaviour and it is created by religion (or lack thereof), social stigma, percived social class, local society and so forth.

 

[Pulse]

Small things please small minds while bigger fools look on.

 

[Eggsnham]

Yes yes, obvious subject line designed to draw attention. Here's the real thing:

People complain about stupid people all the time. But I almost never meet someone that functionally retarded. I go to work in an office, do my job, come home, watch TV/play games/whatever. If there's a party or meetup going on that I'm interested in, I'll go. Simple as that.

The thing is, I never meet people that I really hate. I see so much complaining online about stupid facebook status updates and stupid conversations with friends, but I never find myself engaging with that type of person. I know that the recent election made a lot of people very confrontational, but not one facebook friend I had posted that kind of reaction. Nobody gloating, nobody complaining.

So why is it that I have some kind of anti-stupid field around me? Yeah, I've met stupid people, especially when I was working retail, but despite how common they are, they're practically a legend to me.

Part of it is likely because people see somebody doing something stupid once and just assume that that person is completely devoid of all intelligence in all aspects of life, no matter what.

For example: When I (or somebody I know is) am driving and somebody else does something incredibly stupid and dangerous; the most common knee-jerk reaction in such a situation seems to be to insult the other driver's intelligence.

And then of course there's the fact that most people immediately categorize everybody they meet as being stupid, smart, etc. based on political or religious views.

 

[Ice Car]

So... You ever gone to public school before?

 

[Watcheroftrends]

You need to be somewhere that exposes you to a large sample of the population. Working at a superstore, I would definitely say the average person is stupid. It's not a matter of academic intelligence. For example, the number of people who leave things in their cart rather than putting them on the counter so I can scan them is amazing. I have to ask them to do that for me so I can actually sell them what they want to buy. How does one not comprehend this? They also pile shit up rather than feeding it in a steady matter so I end up struggling to scan and bag the items without missing or double scanning. Or when people pay with a credit card, they aren't waiting to sign the pinpad. I have to tell them that now we need your signature, please sign on here. As if you've never bought a single fucking thing with the card before - the process is identical everywhere. Pay attention, please. Maybe most shocking is how people will want to return something and start giving me some life story about how it didn't match the other curtains they bought, all the while holding onto the receipt I need to scan to process the return. Look, I don't care if you want to tell me that - I'll listen, but just give me the fucking slip of paper so the people behind you can get their return done in a timely manner. In general, it's just a lack of awareness regarding the purpose behind why people are even where they and doing what they are doing in the first place.